Monday, April 30, 2012

Here’s the Rundown on the Latest Evolution Blackball Operation

University of Texas El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell wrote a paper on how the second law of thermodynamics bears on the theory of evolution. The paper was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. But after a blogger complained the journal, Applied Mathematics Letters (AML), pulled the article, in violation of its own professional standards. That evolutionary blackball operation ended up costing the journal $10,000 in attorney’s fees.

The evolutionist’s next move was not only to continue to reject the letter, but to publish criticism of the peer-reviewed, accepted, unpublished, rejected paper in the journal Mathematical Intelligencer (MI). And their final move was to reject Sewell’s response to the criticism, again in violation of their own standards.

It is yet another episode of the Banality of Evilution which has evolutionists falling over themselves to blackball those who disagree.

Secondly, there was no censorship nor intent to censor. There was merely intent to prevent an error-filled paper that should never have passed peer-review from being published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Thirdly, criticism is precisely what peer-review is, and if a paper is severely criticised, it is not published.

Rejecting a paper is not censoring it. And indeed, the paper is not censored. In fact it's more publicly accessible than it would have been if it had been published in the journal. And it's had a heck of a lot more publicity.

Finally, in Bob Lloyd's article he provides a live link to Sewell's original article.

What sort of "censorship" is it that actually publicises and facilitates the reading of the "censored" document?

Awe, come on. It's censorship because, if a paper is rejected, it will not be seen by the majority of scientists even if it is subsequently published on a blog. Sewell's paper is getting more attention only because of the controversy, not because it was rejected.

Having said that, I personally disagree with ID advocates for wanting to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Peer review is a censoring mechanism invented by a condescending elite in order to keep their work out of public scrutiny, the same public who pay their salaries. It's time to tear down this wall and allow more democratic access to the scientific enterprise. But I'm not holding my breath.

Almost any scientist reading that paper would (and did) immediately see that it made no sense.

I was a bit slow myself, but I plead not being a physicist. Also sheer incredulity that anyone could say anything quite as wrong as what it turned out he was actually saying.

The reviewers probably weren't physicists either. Mathematicians may have checked the math, and the math is probably fine. The problem is that the math doesn't apply to the systems he applied it to.

The more publicity Sewell's rejected paper gets, and the more people read it, the sillier ID will look. And the more the DI defends it, the sillier the DI will look.

"Having said that, I personally disagree with ID advocates for wanting to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Peer review is a censoring mechanism invented by a condescending elite in order to keep their work out of public scrutiny, the same public who pay their salaries. It's time to tear down this wall and allow more democratic access to the scientific enterprise. But I'm not holding my breath."

Well, to some extent I agree. I think peer-review may have had its day. The most important part of peer-review is what happens after publication, not before - replication and citation.

And the current system is far from perfect. I am in too minds, as with democracy - it's not a good system, but may be better than any other.

Having said that, of course I completely disagree that it is a "censoring mechanism". I actually think that to use that word is to demean the brave people in the world who really do suffer from censorship = no opportunity to make their views heard at all. Peer-review is not censorship. In fact, given paywalls, it is reverse-censorship - the public is deprived of the right to read publications they have often (but not always) contributed to with their taxes.

My own view is that now that the costs of publication are low (some journals are online only, and most of the copy-editing is done by the authors themselves), peer-review should consist simply of checking for errors, and not on evaluations of the "importance" or "novelty" of the work, nor even on whether the result is "statistically significant", and all papers should be open-access. That would remove several major publication biases, and greatly improve science.

So perhaps we do agree on some things :) Still, Sewell's paper wouldn't get through that system either, except by mistake, because it is clearly and simply wrong!

It is yet another episode of brain-dead creationists rushing to support any contribution from their side, without pausing to reflect on the merits of the contribution.

Says the feces-for-brain evolutionist. Why did the journal apologize and agree to pay $10,000? Was it because Granville Sewell is brain-dead or was it because the journal engaged in censorship and realized that they could not wriggle their way out of it in court without making fools of themselves for the whole world to see?

Of course it was quality control. Why would a journal want to a publish a paper that is clearly wrong?

That's the part you keep missing.

If a journal editor discovers that a paper with errors has inadvertently slipped through the peer-review process, they are not only within their rights, they have a duty to either retract it or issue an erratum, if it is too late. Nobody has a right to have their errors published, just because no-one spotted them before the hard copy was printed.

Of course it was quality control. Why would a journal want to a publish a paper that is clearly wrong?

To answer your question: they wouldn't.

That's why they have a peer-review process. The paper cleared the peer-review process. Then, when a Panda's Thumb contributor writes a letter (here), they decide not to publish it.

Do you see anywhere where they sent it back for further peer-review? I don't

Here's an interesting take on all of this: two "peer-reviewed" papers, one saying that evolution causes life to become more complex, and hence increase in entropy (Styer), and one that says dissipative processes within the cell causes entropy to increase--and is the driving force we call NS, have been published with in the last five years. So evolutionists can't get their story straight, but they get published. Sewell critiques the evolutionists, and his paper gets rejected.

What else is at work except this principle: "Whatever you write in defense of evolution can be published; anything you write in criticism of evolution is not to be published."

"That's why they have a peer-review process. The paper cleared the peer-review process. Then, when a Panda's Thumb contributor writes a letter (here), they decide not to publish it."

It appears that the paper, though about physics, was reviewed by people without expertise in physics. This occasionally happens - that a paper is reviewed by people in the wrong domain, in this case, probably because the journal was a mathematical one (you have to ask why Sewell didn't send it to a physics journal as it is about physics).

And the equations are probably fine.

However, the physics is, simply, daft.

As soon as someone with an education in science looked at it, they immediately saw the problem. So, I suspect, did the editor.

It was careless editing and inadequate reviewing.

I don't see what is so difficult to understand about this.

It was not rejected because it criticised evolutionary theory. In fact, the reasons given for rejection are pusillanimous, in my view. But the reasons it should not have been published are given quite clearly by Bob Lloyd: and these are that it makes no sense. Not because it makes an argument against evolution, but because if the argument was true, it would be an argument against our daily observations!

Nothing has been found to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. That's why it's called a "law".

If Sewell's argument was correct, not only would the 2LoT be a problem for evolution but for life itself.

Life - and evolution - results in both local increases and local decreases in entropy. These are not contradictory, any more than to say that the weather can get warmer is a contradiction of the statement that the weather can get cooler.

As it happens, we have been dissecting Sewell's arguments at Elizabeth's blog. On technical merits, they don't withstand scrutiny. If I were a journal editor, I'd reject Sewell's papers.

If you are interested in details, feel free to stop by. The people who participate in the discussions have a pretty good understanding of statistical physics. Among them are Joe Felsenstein, Mike Elzinga, Bob Lloyd and myself. Elizabeth invited Granville to participate, but he never showed up. That's too bad.

The problem is not that it was rejected because it does not stand scrutiny (most evolutionist papers are not worth the electrons they are displayed with). The problem is that it was rejected for political reasons.

"The problem is not that it was rejected because it does not stand scrutiny (most evolutionist papers are not worth the electrons they are displayed with). The problem is that it was rejected for political reasons."

But it does not stand scrutiny. So why would you assume it was rejected for any other reason?

If the journal used those words, they were being kind. Or canny, I'm not sure. But if they rejected it because if its errors, then they were not being honest, and if they rejected on other grounds, then they were being stupid. It should have been rejected for the simple reason is that the entire paper is one glaring error.

Not because it presents any threat to evolution, but because it presents a threat to common sense.

What astonishes me is that all the IDists here are focussing on the fact of its retraction, and nobody has offered any defence of the paper itself. Well, one person has, but that person said that the hadn't really followed the argument.

Cornelius has the right background to evaluate the paper, and hasn't commented on its content at all.

You don't have to take my word for it, you just need to apply some High School physics to the paper and work it out for yourself.

I guess if you are in the 'something from nothing' crowd anything is acceptable if it supports your inane worldview. I wonder how these Neanderthals would like it if the shoe was on the other foot and they were denied the due process that Granville was denied. Not only does evolution demean science, but it demeans human dignity as well. But I suppose if you can't understand basic logic (something comes from nothing - evolution), you can't understand human rights and human dignity either (people are not special, they are just material objects like everything else). What a corrupting influence evolution is.

Keep up the good work CH. Judging from your critics, you are obviously having an important impact on society with your cogent analysis, otherwise they wouldn't be so concerned that you could burst their bubble, the evolution delusion. Nobody understands the field more completely, and deeply than you.

Where MI made their mistake was in accepting his paper in the first place without ensuring it had received rigorous review.

And yes, I think that potentially CH and his colleagues at the DI may have an important impact on society. That's why some of us think it is important to apply rigorous review to their output!

Sewell is a mathematician who wrote a paper about physics (nothing wrong with that) and then sent it to a mathematical journal, where it was apparently not reviewed by people with the relevant expertise to evaluate it.

Physicists (and indeed, most people with a science back ground, tbh) can readily see that it makes no sense.

Wouldn't you prefer to have good arguments to support your case, than ones that can be easily dismantled by any competent scientist? Even Answers In Genesis rejected that particular argument!

And if you (or anyone else) are interested in more details, you'd be welcome to join the discussion at my blog:

http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=859

I did invite Granville Sewell to come over, but he declined. Bob Lloyd has made some contributions, however, as have a number of ID proponents.

Sewell was given his "due process." His papers were reviewed by referees, found wanting, and rejected by editors. As Shallit pointed out, this happens in scientific and mathematical journals all the time.

I had manuscripts rejected after peer review. What did I do after that? Complain on the internet that my rights were trampled? Sorry, pal, publishing in any given journal is a privilege, not a right. You pick up the pieces and move on. Submit your paper to another journal.

I hear BIO-Complexity is a little short on submissions. I am sure they will be glad to publish Sewell's stuff.

Can't you read? Enough information was provided via links in the (tiny) article above that you could have prevented the embarrassment of soiling yourself in public by making up or repeating what is not true. Try to read the provided info about this specific case before commenting! If you have any evidence that the account given is not true, then provide it.

Sewell's argument is so invalid that it argues (in effect) that plants can't grow, that their growth violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Does Cornelius Hunter agree with Sewell?

If so, perhaps everyone will forgive us for laughing ...

AML did a ridiculously poor job of reviewing and accepted something laughably bad. I have little respect for them even after the withdrawal of the paper because they never honestly admitted that they had made a boo-boo, a big one. I think they accepted the paper out of a desire to be seen as hosting a Major Controversy. They are a low-cited journal trying to be noticed more. They got noticed in a way that they probably aren't happy with.

Also, Cornelius should learn what an "attorney's fee" is. A payment to a potential plaintiff by a potential defendant is not an attorney's fee.

If you are interested, you would be very welcome to join the ongoing discussion at my blog (not trying to poach, just noting that there are a number of people their doing a great job of explaining). The links are in someone else's post, I think.

Felsenstein, please. I doubt that Sewell argued that plants can't grow. It's your interpretation of his work and, like I said, you have no monopoly on truth. In fact, your response to my comment tells me you're a liar and a propagandist, plain and simple. See ya.

However, the implications of his arguments are that they can't grow without violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

That should tell us (and does) that there is something very wrong with his argument.

When plants grow, carbon dioxide and water are converted to sugar by photosynthesis within the plant. Sugar is then used to do work for the plant, just as it does work for us when we eat the plants, or eat the animals that eat the plants. How did the plant manage to convert high entropy water and carbon dioxide (not able to do much work) to low entropy sugar (able to do a lot of work)?

It did so by utilising solar radiation, which Granville dismisses as being not useful for decreasing entropy (quoting himself, his own ellipses):

"Order can increase in an open system, not because the laws of probability are suspended when the door is open, butsimply because order may walk in through the door. . . . If we found evidence that DNA, auto parts, computer chips,and books entered through the Earth’s atmosphere at some time in the past, then perhaps the appearance of humans,cars, computers, and encyclopedias on a previously barren planet could be explained without postulating a violationof the second law here. . . . But if all we see entering is radiation and meteorite fragments, it seems clear that what isentering through the boundary cannot explain the increase in order observed here."

(my emphasis)

Well, all that entered the plant was radiation, and yet what happened was a huge increase in order - from carbon dioxide and water to sugar, a high-energy food stuff.

I haven't read Sewell's arguments and I don't pretend to understand his position. However, if he was talking about information, I would concur that the addition of radiation energy will not cause any increase in information in the plant system. The information in the plant DNA will either remain the same or decrease while the plant grows.

Having said that, I don't think Sewell's approach at refuting evolution and OOL arguments is interesting to me. There is a much better way to falsify ID in my opinion. My understanding of intelligent design is that it necessarily creates a tree of life, not a nested TOL based on common descent a la Darwinian evolution, but a non-nested TOL wherein designs can be laterally shared by distant branches of the tree.

This is what is currently being found by researchers who analyze and compare the genomes of various species.

Elizabeth Liddle has explained to Louis Savain why Sewell's argument really does imply plants can't grow. No, Sewell was not talking about whether radiation would "cause any increase in information in the plant system". He was making an argument that evolution violated the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Alas for his argument, if true it would also show that plant growth would violate that law.

Louis was awfully quick to question my interpretation of Sewell's argument, to say that I simply expected people to accept my word on authority, and to throw words like "liar and propagandist" around when he admits that he has not read Sewell's arguments.

Felsenstein, I don't trust people like you on instinct. I wear your criticism of me like a badge of honor. I refuse to take your word for anything. And I do find it hard to believe that Sewell would make such an elementary mistake.

However, whether or not Sewell was mistaken in his arguments is really of little importance compared to the greater issue of the validity of Darwinian evolution as a science. I and others think it's pseudoscience at best and fraud at worse.

If Savain finds it "hard to believe that Sewell would make such an elementary mistake", then I have a very clever suggestion for him:

Try reading him.

If the real issue is "the validity of Darwinian evolution as a science" then I have another suggestion: Savain should not waste his time arguing with people who are questioning Sewell's argument, and Savain particularly should not spend his time calling them names.

People might get a bad impression of Savain and not trust him on instinct.

Having said that, I don't think Sewell's approach at refuting evolution and OOL arguments is interesting to me.

"The grapes were sour anyway".

What is at issue here is that a completely fallacious paper was initially accepted by a journal, then rejected when at least two people with science degrees noticed it, and pointed it out to the editor.

In this blog there is much discussion about censorship of the paper etc.

There has been no discussion, on the ID side about the actual paper.

Nobody has attempted to defend its content, merely attack the journal for failing to publish it.

Do you, and other IDists, really want a paper published in support of ID that makes an argument so bad that anyone with a basic science education can see that it makes no sense? That i's arguments, if valid, would lead to the nonsensical conclusion, among other conclusions, that plants can't grow?

Or weather can't happen?

Or that carbon in a solid doesn't diffuse along a thermal gradient if the thermal gradient is the result of solar radiation?

Does the DI, the intellectual powerhouse of ID, have nothing to say about the idiocy of Sewell's paper? However much they may wish to support Sewell personally, or object to the way he was treated (accepting his paper then rejecting it, although if I had $10,000 dollars for every rejection letter I'd have, that would fund a lot of research), does it not occur to any of them, Cornelius for one, to distance themselves from his actual argument?

Cornelius is one of the few physicists at the DI - shouldn't you at least point out the problem, Cornelius?

Or does the argument not matter, as long as the conclusion is favorable to ID?

Well since I am not that well versed in higher math, but must rely on empirical evidence, can someone please show me the exact empirical evidence of JUST ONE functional protein arising by purely material processes?

Homochirality and Darwin: part 2 - Robert Sheldon - May 2010 Excerpt: With regard to the deniers who think homochirality is not much of a problem, I only ask whether a solution requiring multiple massive magnetized black-hole supernovae doesn't imply there is at least a small difficulty to overcome? A difficulty, perhaps, that points to the non-random nature of life in the cosmos? http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2010/05/21/homochirality_and_darwin_part_2.thtml

Left-Handed Amino Acids Explained Naturally? Not by a long shot! - January 2010http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev201101.htm#20110110a

‘Now one more problem as far as the generation of information. It turns out that you don’t only need information to build genes and proteins, it turns out to build Body-Plans you need higher levels of information; Higher order assembly instructions. DNA codes for the building of proteins, but proteins must be arranged into distinctive circuitry to form distinctive cell types. Cell types have to be arranged into tissues. Tissues have to be arranged into organs. Organs and tissues must be specifically arranged to generate whole new Body-Plans, distinctive arrangements of those body parts. We now know that DNA alone is not responsible for those higher orders of organization. DNA codes for proteins, but by itself it does insure that proteins, cell types, tissues, organs, will all be arranged in the body. And what that means is that the Body-Plan morphogenesis, as it is called, depends upon information that is not encoded on DNA. Which means you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan. So what we can conclude from that is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the origin of information necessary to build new genes and proteins, and it is also grossly inadequate to explain the origination of novel biological form.’ - Stephen Meyer - (excerpt taken from Meyer/Sternberg vs. Shermer/Prothero debate - 2009)

As well, how does one go about getting past Dr. Behe's conclusion here? It seems to agree completely with the degenerative processes note in the second law, yet this conclusion is completely antagonistic to the neo-Darwinian scenario.

“The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain - Michael Behe - December 2010Excerpt: In its most recent issue The Quarterly Review of Biology has published a review by myself of laboratory evolution experiments of microbes going back four decades.,,, The gist of the paper is that so far the overwhelming number of adaptive (that is, helpful) mutations seen in laboratory evolution experiments are either loss or modification of function. Of course we had already known that the great majority of mutations that have a visible effect on an organism are deleterious. Now, surprisingly, it seems that even the great majority of helpful mutations degrade the genome to a greater or lesser extent.,,, I dub it “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain.(that is a net 'fitness gain' within a 'stressed' environment i.e. remove the stress from the environment and the parent strain is always more 'fit')http://behe.uncommondescent.com/2010/12/the-first-rule-of-adaptive-evolution/

Michael Behe: Challenging Darwin, One Peer-Reviewed Paper at a Time - December 2010 - podcasthttp://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-12-23T11_53_46-08_00

10^500 versions of Scott, I really have no clue what you are asking. As far as how deep my thinking on Dinosaur fossils go. Dinosaurs ARE fossils. Moreover from the best evidence we have, Dinosaur fossils appeared abruptly in the fossil record;

Darwin vs. the Fossils Excerpt: “Over 30 million dinosaur bones and parts, some in excellent states of preservation, have been identified, and although much speculation exists, not a single documented plausible direct ancestor has yet been located,” “All known dinosaurs appear fully formed in the fossil record.” - Dr. Jerry Bergman http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev200912.htm#20091211a

Oldest Evidence of Dinosaurs in Footprints: Dinosaur Lineage Emerged Soon After Massive Permian Extinction – October 2010 Excerpt: The oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage — fossilized tracks — is described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction,,,, This fossilized trackway places the very closest relatives of dinosaurs on Earth about 250 million years ago — 5 to 9 million years earlier than previously described fossilized skeletal material has indicated,,, “We see the closest dinosaur cousins immediately after the worst mass extinction,”,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101006085311.htm

Now if you want to know my thinking on how Quantum Mechanics relates to the space-time of General Relativity, The following quote gets very close to my thinking on the subject:

LIVING IN A QUANTUM WORLD - Vlatko Vedral - 2011Excerpt: Thus, the fact that quantum mechanics applies on all scales forces us to confront the theory’s deepest mysteries. We cannot simply write them off as mere details that matter only on the very smallest scales. For instance, space and time are two of the most fundamental classical concepts, but according to quantum mechanics they are secondary. The entanglements are primary. They interconnect quantum systems without reference to space and time. If there were a dividing line between the quantum and the classical worlds, we could use the space and time of the classical world to provide a framework for describing quantum processes. But without such a dividing line—and, indeed, with­out a truly classical world—we lose this framework. We must ex­plain space and time (4D space-time) as somehow emerging from fundamental­ly spaceless and timeless physics.http://phy.ntnu.edu.tw/~chchang/Notes10b/0611038.pdf

Scott: I'll ask yet again: are dinosaurs an interpretation of our best explanation of fossils? Or are they *the* explanation for fossils?

Born: Dinosaurs ARE fossils. Moreover from the best evidence we have, Dinosaur fossils appeared abruptly in the fossil record;

Are you sure about that? Why are they not simply one of many interpretation of fossils?

For example, what of the rival interpretation of QM that fossils only come into existence when they are consciously observed. Therefore, fossils are no older than human beings. As such, they are not evidence of dinosaurs, but evidence of acts of those particular observations.

Another interpretation would be that dinosaurs are such weird animals that conventional logic simply doesn't apply to them. What of this interpretation?

One could also suggests It's meaningless to ask if dinosaurs were real or just a useful fiction to explain fossils. What about this interpretation?

What's unclear here is why you think dinosaurs *are* the explanation of fossils, despite there being an infinite number of rival interpretations that accept the same observations but say dinosaurs were not there, millions of years ago, including one based on your own claims of quantum mechanics!

In other words, in appealing to the idea that evolution is just an interpretation of fossils, you're appealing to a general purpose means of denying absolutely anything, including that dinosaurs *are* the explanation of fossils.

CH: But after a blogger complained the journal, Applied Mathematics Letters (AML), pulled the article, in violation of its own professional standards.

For a start, saying that "a blogger" complained is "poisoning the well". To my knowledge, two credentialled scientists complained, one of whom blogged about it.

More to the point, it is not a "violation of its own professional standards" for a journal to decide against publishing an article, even after acceptance, if errors are pointed out.

If the article is already published, it is sometimes withdrawn, and an erratum issued.

MI were certainly at fault in not reviewing the paper competently, and fortunately the error was spotted (by scientists) before the article actually appeared in print.

But given that they made that error, they would be in violation of their own professional standards if the had published it, or published it and then not withdrawn it.

The whole point of peer-reviewed journals is to maximise the chance that publications reach some threshold quality standard. This one clearly does not, as you have the relevant training to see for yourself, Cornelius.

You really should research the facts more instead of just blindly taking the opposite side of whatever argument an intelligent design proponent is using at the moment. This makes you appear close minded and ideological.

I retract the description of the two people who I know wrote to the journal as "credentialled scientists" although both have degrees in science (one in chemistry, one in computer science), and therefore my complaint that Cornelius was "poisoning the well".

That was my mistake.

My major point stands: the paper contains errors that you do not even need a science degree to spot, and clearly was not reviewed by physicists. The journal would not have been justified in retracting the paper had some "blogger" merely "complained". I expect "bloggers" complain about stuff all the time.

However, having taken the complaint seriously, the editor clearly read the paper, and discovered the mistake. Given that the errors in the paper are absolutely real, they would not have been justified in NOT retracting it.

As for your last point, I do not "blindly" take any side of an argument. In fact, I even wrote a supportive post at UD to Granville Sewell when the paper was first retracted. However, when I re-read it, I realised the extent of his error. To be honest, it is so egregious that I simply had not believed my eyes. I had assumed he was saying something more reasonable than he was. Perhaps his first reviewers made the same mistake!

And I don't mind whether I "appear close minded and ideological". What matters is whether I am, and I am not.

To be honest I'm not very familiar with Granvell Sewell's paper. I've read a few articles by him and I think I have the gist of what he is trying to say.

He basically says that evolution is a disaster movie running backwards (where the debris from the collapsed buildings comes together to form a nice pristine city by the end of the movie) and says that entropy and disorder increase in a system, rather than decrease, EXCEPT in the case of abiogenesis and evolution, where a lifeless primoridal planet covered with lava ends up forming super computers, Beethoven's fifth symphony, and dolphins.

His arguments make sense to me. It seems counter-intuitive that just adding sunlight to a lifeless rock would end in the creation of the Eiffel tower, but I am open minded and willing to be persuaded on the issue.

If you want to insist that this is the case, simply create a laboratory situation where sunlight is added to a lifeless primordial environment composed of whatever ingredients you like and show me even a primitive lifeform arising out of the goo. Then I will happily concede that the Darwinian narrative is plausible.

wgb: He basically says that evolution is a disaster movie running backwards (where the debris from the collapsed buildings comes together to form a nice pristine city by the end of the movie) and says that entropy and disorder increase in a system, rather than decrease, EXCEPT in the case of abiogenesis and evolution, where a lifeless primoridal planet covered with lava ends up forming super computers, Beethoven's fifth symphony, and dolphins.

His arguments make sense to me. It seems counter-intuitive that just adding sunlight to a lifeless rock would end in the creation of the Eiffel tower, but I am open minded and willing to be persuaded on the issue.

Yes, but the problem is that his arguments also lead to the conclusion that adding sunlight to a lifeless rock wouldn't even make it warmer on one side than the other!

And we know this is untrue.

There may well be reasons to think that abiogenesis (or evolution, given abiogenesis) are not adequate to account for biology, but Sewell's is clearly not one of them, because it leads not to counter-intuitive conclusions but to clearly counterfactual conclusions!

If you added more energy to the rock, e.g with more intense sunlight, then wouldn't the temperature on both sides of the rock even out sooner? Evoltionists say that adding energy to a closed system ges around the problem of entropy for abiogenesis. But adding energy tends to increase entropy, so it makes the problem worse. In a closed system, like a rock in sunlight, a temporary state of equilibrium can be reached where entropy decreases temporarily. But I understood the evolutionists to be saying that you can decrease entropy in one closed system even going so far as to make bio-molecules spontaneously, as long as you increase it somewhere else. But this sounds like spooky action at a distance, or magic, or whatever, if there isn't a mechanism.

Well, I've never heard an evolutionist say that. Do you have a citation?

But in any case, that wouldn't help Sewell, because his argument leads to the conclusion that the sun cannot cause entropy decreases on earth because it's just "radiation". But clearly it can, as it does in a sunlit rock. You could even use the two sides of the sunlit rock to drive a thermocouple, and light a lamp :)

Elizabeth: There may well be reasons to think that abiogenesis (or evolution, given abiogenesis) are not adequate to account for biology, but Sewell's is clearly not one of them, because it leads not to counter-intuitive conclusions but to clearly counterfactual conclusions!

I do believe that S.J. Gould said that adding energy can get us areound the problem of entropy with regard to abiogenesis. IF you try to make big biomolecules, entropy is working against you. That's why it's relevant to evolution. But if the most adding energy can do is create temporary temperature gradient on a rock, then it really won't help very much.

I do believe that the chemists can make big molecules because they use complex systems to control the flow of energy through the system. Organisms do the same thing. But the systems used by chemist were designed.

And, to the best of my knowledge, endothermic reactions are the result of a system reaching a temporary equilibrium state.

I can violate the law of gravity by picking something up, too. That requires energy directed in a certain way. Chemists use energy directed in a certain way, also. Organisms do the same thing. I think the relevant point is that just saying "add energy" doesn't help with the problem of abiogenesis and such. In fact, organisms are always fighting entropy. They have complex systems to maintain homeostasis.

Under Sewell's odd definition of entropy in his AML piece (where his U function represents a carbon concentration), the entropy in equation 3 no longer has entropy units (of energy per degree). Rather, Sewell's "X-entropy" is a dimensionless quantity. That itself should raise a red flag. Sewell has defined a novel quantity, mislabeling it an "X-entropy" (which is not an entropy, wrong units), and claims that every possible X-entropy has its own "second law" associated with it. In effect, he has proposed new laws of physics out of whole cloth --- laws that in fact violate the 2nd law of thermo in addition to trivial experimental observations. It's just pure quackery nonsense, on par with perpetual motion machine pseudo-science. Sewell's obscene errors have absolutely nothing to do with evolution -- they simply contradict physics as we know it.

Measuring entropy in joules per kelvin is an anachronism remaining from the nineteenth century, when entropy was introduced on phenomenological grounds. The statistical definition of entropy as the logarithm of the phase volume does away with this practice. These days, physicists often treat entropy as a dimensionless quantity.

It's a question of units. Just like length can be measured in meters or feet, you can measure entropy in joules per kelvin or in bits, which is to say in no units.

Oleg, that's obfuscatory pfiffle. You can of course redefine any physical quantity in different unit systems, and you can arbitrarily make anything unitless. And sometimes that's computationally convenient. But that has nothing to do with what Sewell is arguing --- he is not using non-standard unit systems and his equation 3 makes no reference to a phase space, anyway.

If you look at his AML piece, equation 3 is a restatement of the classical definition of entropy S_t. When Q is heat and U is a temperature distribution, the units of S_t in his equation 3 are the usual classical entropy units, Joules per Kelvin (as they should be). But if you try to substitute in "carbon concentration" for U, as Sewell erroneously claims you can, then the resulting "entropy" S_t has different units! His argument is therefore internally inconsistent, and an easy, obvious way to see it is that his equation has a units problem. In classical thermodynamics you cannot just arbitrarily replace heat with whatever you want . His claim that "there is really nothing special about 'thermal' entropy" is absurd --- in classic thermo, entropy is defined in terms of heat.

Evolution is a Fact, Just Like Gravity is a Fact! UhOh! - January 2010Excerpt: The results of this paper suggest gravity arises as an entropic force, once space and time themselves have emerged.http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/evolution-is-a-fact-just-like-gravity-is-a-fact-uhoh/

Entropy of the Universe – Hugh Ross – May 2010Excerpt: Egan and Lineweaver found that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to the observable universe’s entropy. They showed that these supermassive black holes contribute about 30 times more entropy than what the previous research teams estimated.http://www.reasons.org/entropy-universe

“But why was the big bang so precisely organized, whereas the big crunch (or the singularities in black holes) would be expected to be totally chaotic? It would appear that this question can be phrased in terms of the behaviour of the WEYL part of the space-time curvature at space-time singularities. What we appear to find is that there is a constraint WEYL = 0 (or something very like this) at initial space-time singularities-but not at final singularities-and this seems to be what confines the Creator’s choice to this very tiny region of phase space.”Roger Penrose - How Special Was The Big Bang?

Thermodynamics – 3.1 EntropyExcerpt:Entropy – A measure of the amount of randomnessor disorder in a system.http://www.saskschools.ca/curr_content/chem30_05/1_energy/energy3_1.htm

Blackholes- The neo-Darwinian ultimate ‘god of randomness’ which can create all life in the universe (according to them)https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fxhJEGNeEQ_sn4ngQWmeBt1YuyOs8AQcUrzBRo7wISw/edit?hl=en_US

What Would Happen If You Fell into a Black Hole? - videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLMiJQXsmkc

Scientists gear up to take a picture of a black hole - January 2012Excerpt: "Swirling around the black hole like water circling the drain in a bathtub, the matter compresses and the resulting friction turns it into plasma heated to a billion degrees or more, causing it to 'glow' – and radiate energy that we can detect here on Earth."http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-scientists-gear-picture-black-hole.html

The Future of the UniverseExcerpt: After all the black holes have evaporated, (and after all the ordinary matter made of protons has disintegrated, if protons are unstable), the universe will be nearly empty. Photons, neutrinos, electrons and positrons will fly from place to place, hardly ever encountering each other. It will be cold, and dark, and there is no known process which will ever change things. --- Not a happy ending.http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys240/lectures/future/future.html

Big RipExcerpt: The Big Rip is a cosmological hypothesis first published in 2003, about the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, are progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future. Theoretically, the scale factor of the universe becomes infinite at a finite time in the future.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

Music and Verse:

Romans 8:18-21I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Here is another interesting tidbit on entropy that you will never hear a neo-Darwinist bring up in discussion:

According to esteemed British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (1931-present), the initial entropy of the universe, required such precision that the "Creator’s aim must have been to an accuracy of 1 part in 10^10^123”. This precision this number represents is simply unfathomable by mere human minds in any meaningful context. For instance, just to write this number out in its entirety, 1 with 10^123 zeros to the right, it could not be written on a piece of paper the size of the entire visible universe, even if a zero were written down on each sub-atomic particle in the entire universe since the universe only has 10^80 sub-atomic particles in it!!!

The Physics of the Small and Large: What is the Bridge Between Them? Roger Penrose Excerpt: "The time-asymmetry is fundamentally connected to with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: indeed, the extraordinarily special nature (to a greater precision than about 1 in 10^10^123, in terms of phase-space volume) can be identified as the "source" of the Second Law (Entropy)." http://www.pul.it/irafs/CD%20IRAFS%2702/texts/Penrose.pdf

How special was the big bang? - Roger Penrose Excerpt: This now tells us how precise the Creator's aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123. (from the Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose, pp 339-345 - 1989) http://www.ws5.com/Penrose/

Its funny how the journal rejected Sewell's paper based on some (valid or invalid or philosophical) objection by some anonymous Darwinian blogger (probably thirsty to update Sewell's "creationist" track record on Wikipedia).

Since then we have educated Darwinists (specializing in physics) arguing over why the paper is wrong. They know its wrong, but they just can't agree as to why.Meanwhile papers with errors are routinely published and up for scrutiny. That is how science works after all.

Oh no, computerist29, we know what's wrong with it. It has many errors, so it takes a while to enumerate them. Come over to Elizabeth's blog and learn with us. We're going over this stuff in some detail. It's instructive to see so many errors in one place.

I note that not a single ID proponent, including Cornelius, whose PhD is in a relevant domain, has attempted to defend Sewell's paper.

We've had "well evolutionist papers are rubbish too".

We've had "it's censorship!"

We've had "Why should we believe some anonymous blogger that it's bad?"

We've had "You are liars".

We've had "It passed peer-review so it must have been OK".

We've had "well it's not a very interesting argument anyway."

Nobody has noted that (non-)anonymous bloggers notwithstanding, the author of the critical piece in MI is emeritus professor of chemistry, also a highly relevant domain, at Trinity College Dublin, and has clearly demonstrated what is wrong with the paper.

And nobody defending Sewell has even claimed to have to read Sewell's paper, let alone Lloyd's, while several have confessed that they haven't.

Somebody in this thread accused me of "blindly" taking the evolutionist side of the argument. No, I did not. I read Sewell's paper, re-read it, thought about it, and realised that it was absurd.

In contrast, the evidence in this thread suggests that pro-IDists here have "blindly" taken Sewell's side of the argument. They have either not read the paper at all, by their own admission, or, having read it, offered no defence of its arguments whatsoever.

If that's not "blindly" taking the side of the argument you happen to like, I don't know what is.

I'm kidding, of course. It's totally expected. Cornelius had no idea whether Sewell's paper is good or bad. He now has a choice. Get into the nitty-gritty and acknowledge that Sewell's "X-entropy" is an epic FAIL or keep mum on the subject. The latter is obviously safer.

Of course I'll update my site (eventually, not much time for this at the moment, but planning a major revision next year) to reflect recent discoveries. Science marches on. But what makes you think 1.2 has been falsified?

I admit I'm skeptical --- I hear this from creationists all the time, and so far the claims don't pan out when investigated. Usually the claim rests on some new observation of convergence. But convergence is a prediction of evolutionary theory (adaptation in a similar environment or under similar biophysical constraints), and usually convergent structures are only superficially convergent, actually reinforcing the nested hierarchy. So what's your evidence?

Doug, thanks for the response! I've wanted to discuss this for awhile ... I actually feel a bit honored by being able to do so.

We have lots of evidence, but I'm not sure that evolutionists have any criteria for judging whether convergence is reasonable or not. There is even another term called "cascades of convergence" to describe the origin of complex similarities in the michrondria of Dinoflagellates and Euglenids. Do you have an objective measure of when its time to call it quits with convergence?

Falsification: When it became possible to sequence biological molecules, the realization of a markedly different tree based on the independent molecular evidence would have been a fatal blow to the theory of evolution, even though that is by far the most likely result. More precisely, the common descent hypothesis would have been falsified if the universal phylogenetic trees determined from the independent molecular and morphological evidence did not match with statistical significance. Furthermore, we are now in a position to begin construction of phylogenetic trees based on other independent lines of data, such as chromosomal organization. In a very general sense, chromosome number and length and the chromosomal position of genes are all causally independent of both morphology and of sequence identity. Phylogenies constructed from these data should recapitulate the standard phylogenetic tree as well

In fact, you are correct, this has been partly falsified. Phylogenies constructed from genetic and protein data do not always recapitulate the standard phylogenetic tree.

Does this mean that evolution as a whole has been falsified? No, what it means is that the hypothesis that all genetic transfer is longitudinal has been falsified, and that "common descent" is over simplistic. While the common ancestor of chimps and humans may have been a apey-looking thing, actually we also share ancestral genetic sequences with viruses, who are vastly remote from us on the tree of life, while we do not share that material with species that are far closer.

So the theory of evolution has to change at least a little, to include some mechanism other than longitudinal genetic transfer to account for these violations. I'm not sure how many hypotheses were suggested, but one of them was viral transfer, and this hypotheses made predictions that were subsequently supported by new data.

So yes, the theory of evolution, as it stood, was in fact falsified. Not vastly, but an important part of it was slightly wrong. It is now slightly righter.

I think one problem is that "the theory of evolution" isn't just one simple theory. It's a vast body of interconnecting theories, some of which are better-supported than others. What makes it convincing as a whole is not that it is complete, or unfalsified, or just super-persuasive, but that is both coherent and robust - able to take on modifications without the coherence of the whole being destroyed. It is consilient, in other words, and where contradictory data is found, on the whole, successful hypotheses that can account for that contradictory data within the framework of the whole are repeatedly found. Now it could be that some remaining puzzles prove really difficult to solve - OOL is one. But that in itself is not a falsfification, it just tells us the theory is incomplete.

It's even more complicated and mixed and matched than your explanation...

In a study published online in Genome Research, in coordination with the publication of the orangutan genome sequence, scientists have presented the surprising finding that although orangutans and humans are more distantly related, some regions of our genomes are more alike than those of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee.

Would you also like to discuss how the genome of the lowly sea squirt leaves the objective nested hierarchy tatters?

I do need to take a break. I found that protist paper interesting, also the bats and dolphins which I knew about, but I haven't looked at the sea squirts paper yet. I might do a blog post about them. Do come over and visit, you'd be very welcome, and it's been nice talking to you.

The OP is about the handling of the paper, not the paper itself. As for how the laws of thermodynamics bear on evolution (do they falsify it, do they make it improbable, etc), it's not on the top of my list for this reason:

Evolutionists claim their theory is a scientific fact. That claim is false. I'm not saying evolution is false. Who knows, maybe evolution is true in some form. But it is not a scientific fact. Anyone on the side of science would be concerned about this.

So the problem with arguments saying evolution is falsified or improbable (unless they are based on data and reasoning that are uncontroversial) is that they do not address the evolutionist's false claim. In fact, they take the focus off of that false claim. In that sense, they bail out evolution. Evolutionists can attack the arguments, rail about it being another nefarious creationist plot, and generally come away with great self satisfaction about how bad those rascals are. All the while, making and promoting false claims.

First you say that the OP is not about the content, just about the handling of the paper. But the content is the key to the handling of the paper! If the paper is transparently fallacious (as we argue), then the scandal is not that it was rejected, but that it was initially accepted. If it is not, then perhaps you have a case. But you do not make that case.

Secondly, the fact that some popular promoters of evolution claim that it is a "fact" has no bearing whatsoever on this case.

I agree with you, it is misleading to claim that evolution is a "fact", at least without being absolutely clear what you mean by "evolution" in the context of your claim. Fine. And yes, I am a little concerned that people say this. I'd rather they said that evolutionary mechanisms have been observed in real time and that evolutionary theory is supported by overwhelming evidence.

Finally, you conclude:

So the problem with arguments saying evolution is falsified or improbable (unless they are based on data and reasoning that are uncontroversial) is that they do not address the evolutionist's false claim.

The problem with Sewell's paper has absolutely nothing to do with his attempt to falsify the claim that it is a fact that evolution occurred.

The problem with Sewell's paper is that his arguments, if valid, would falsify the claim that it is a fact that plants grow.

the fact that some popular promoters of evolution claim that it is a "fact" has no bearing whatsoever on this case.

I didn’t say that it did.

I'd rather they said that evolutionary mechanisms have been observed in real time and that evolutionary theory is supported by overwhelming evidence.

I’m afraid that’s not much of an improvement. To say evolution “is supported by overwhelming evidence” is a very similar claim that misrepresents the science. One could truthfully say that geocentrism is supported by “overwhelming evidence” but of course that would send the wrong message.

The problem with Sewell's paper has absolutely nothing to do with his attempt to falsify the claim that it is a fact that evolution occurred.

I didn’t say that it did.

The problem with Sewell's paper is that his arguments, if valid, would falsify the claim that it is a fact that plants grow.

So that’s exactly why he shouldn’t be censored. It would have been a great teaching moment, but instead they publish criticism without allowing a response. That conveys all the wrong messages.

"So that’s exactly why he shouldn’t be censored. It would have been a great teaching moment, but instead they publish criticism without allowing a response. That conveys all the wrong messages."

For the umpteenth time, rejecting something from a peer-reviewed journal (or any journal) is not censoring it.

Censorship is preventing someone from expressing their views in public. Absolutely nothing prevents Sewell from expressing the views he expressed in that paper in public, and indeed he has done so. Indeed, he will get more exposure (because of no paywall) than he would in the journal, and in addition, he's had a lot of extra publicity, not least in a direct link from Bob Lloyd's article to his original.

What he doesn't get is the minimal imprimatur of peer-review. And nor should he.

Patently erroneous papers should not pass peer-review. When they do (and it sometimes happens), they should be withdrawn. I cannot understand why you are not prepared to actually read the paper and say why (or why not) you think it should have been published.

This isn't a like "well, maybe there can be two opinions on this". It is simply wrong, as Joe's point makes absolutely clear. In fact there are many things wrong with it, and we could argue for a long time about precisely how much is wrong, but the main error is fatal. If his argument was valid, it would mean that plants couldn't grow, and clearly they do.

Here is what I hope is a clear commentary on his argument as presented in his abstract:

It is commonly argued that the spectacular increase in order which has occurred on Earth does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the Earth is an open system, and anything can happen in an open system as long as the entropy increases outside the system compensate the entropy decreases inside the system.

Specifically, the argument is that we see local decreases in entropy on earth as a result of solar radiation, and this gain is "bought" at the cost of increased entropy in the sun itself (it is running out of fuel).

However, if we define "X -entropy" to be the entropy associated with any diffusing component X (for example,X might be heat), and, since entropy measures disorder, "X -order" to be the negative of X -entropy, a closer look at the equations for entropy change shows that they not only say that the X -order cannot increase in a closed system, but that they also say that in an open system the X -order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary.

Sounds reasonable.

Thus the equations for entropy change do not support the illogical "compensation" idea; instead, they illustrate the tautology that "if an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable".

Again, sounds reasonable. But we are of course talking about a open system in which solar radiation enters through the "boundary".

Thus, unless we are willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude that the second law has in fact been violated here.

Now, let us accept, entirely for the sake of argument that "the appearance of spaceships, computers and the Internet" are, in fact, extremely improbable, unless an Intelligent Designer first made living things that were capable of, in turn, designing them, and that life on earth, including intelligent beings capable of designing spaceships etc, was, in fact brought about by an Intelligent Designer.

And we humans figured out that there is a 2nd Law of Thermodynamics that holds throughout the universe in which we find ourselves.

This is accepted by Granville Sewell, and it is accepted by biophysicist Cornelius Hunter: nothing in this universe violates the 2LoT.

Now, let's consider not spaceships and the internet, but an oak tree. A tree is fantastic example of "order" under Sewell's definition, far more wonderful than as a spaceship, because it actually grows spontaneously from an acorn, rather than being laboriously assembled piece by piece.

That acorn contains all the instructions necessary to convert water and carbon dioxide from the environment into tree-stuff, including the assembly of complex molecules tough enough to withstand the enormous lateral wind forces, an ingenious system for raising water from the roots to the crown, where leaves are beautifully spread to catch the solar radiation that enables it to convert carbon dioxide and water molecules into complex energy-storing sugar molecules. Way smarter even than a solar-panelled satellite, it is even self-adjusting, so that if it is stressed on one side, it toughens the trunk on that side, and if it is shadowed by some new object, it can extend its growth towards the sun. etc.

"Thus, unless we are willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of oak trees not extremely improbable, we have to conclude that the second law has in fact been violated here."

Notice that I am not arguing here that the acorn wasn't designed. I am simply demonstrating to you that the influx of solar energy is precisely what makes the construction of a highly complex oak tree highly probable.

Put a solar radiation-proof cover on that acorn, and no matter how beautifully designed it is, it won't grow into an oak tree. What allows it to do so, with all that beautiful X-order (specifically, all that beautiful sugar, full of stored solar energy in usable form, the vast bulk of which did not exist before the acorn germinated, is that "influx of solar energy".

I'm certainly willing to argue that, and I'm sure you are. The alternative is to insist that oak trees growing from acorns would violate the 2nd Law, and therefore are no more likely to grow from acorns than spaceships are likely to grow from primordial goo.

Except that they do.

Therefore Sewell's argument must be wrong.

(Remember - I am not here arguing that evolution is probable - I'm merely demonstrating that Sewell's argument that it cannot have happened because it would violate the 2nd Law is clearly false, because exactly the same argument tells us that "oaks grow from acorns" is also false.

I'd rather they said that evolutionary mechanisms have been observed in real time and that evolutionary theory is supported by overwhelming evidence.

I wouldn't be too overwhelmed with it all.

You seem to imagine that there is only one rigorously specified "theory of evolution" that has been verified in general. Yet... how was the theory specified in the first place, exactly? Darwin? No... so it's the modern synthesis. But going back to the "out of chaos, order" root from which most blurred forms of evolutionary memes emerged for a moment, do you find imagining order and life as we know it selecting itself to arise in chaos and chance equally "overwhelming"? If you have trouble with the word selection note that "selection" was always the word of proponents of creation myths of that sort. So they have always implied knowledge within the organisms that they seek to explain in terms of chance, chaos or blind mechanisms. So it is often imagined that life "selects" for itself and accumulates "chance events" to construct itself through reproduction. Is that what you imagine also? This doesn't seem that overwhelming to me, although the modern synthesis might if it was actually any different than the old memes of the occult.

Note that history indicates that the enlightened or "illuminated ones" who generally gave the masses nature based mythologies of progress actually weren't stupid enough to believe them themselves, otherwise they wouldn't have been associated with the occult and members of secret societies which are based on different creation myths.

That should of course be: "My point is simply that Sewell would be wrong, whether or not evolution is false, because his argument also leads to a patently wrong conclusion namely that plants can't grow."